3. Die Another Day: The Whole Movie
That might be harsh, but it's fair. Die Another Day opens with Pierce Brosnan's galumphing quiz show host of a Bond being captured by the North Koreans and imprisoned for the length of a Madonna song. Dame Judi pulls her finger out eventually and arranges a transfer- Bond for the necrotic Zao- only to find that her star agent has grown Jeff Bridges' beard in the intervening three minutes. It's a surprisingly plausibly turn of events, grounded in something like the politics of the real world, but it's discarded pretty quickly when 007 manages to stop his own heart in order to escape MI6 surveillance. After that, well, you know the rest- an invisible car, an ice palace, Halle Berry, some CGI windsurfing. From geopolitics, we've moved into the realm of 'dude, that sounds awesome!' The great problem with the Pierce Brosnan films is that there are good ideas within them, about how to modernise James Bond and keep him relevant in a post-Cold War context, but they're smothered in silliness that even the Sainted Roger would've turned his eyebrow up at. Part of that, it has to be said, is down to Pierce himself. The guy has an easy enough screen presence but he tended to portray internal conflict by gurning a lot. You can imagine Daniel Craig reluctantly returning to the MI6 fold, scarred physically and psychically by all he's seen- in fact, you don't need to imagine it, just watch Skyfall. With Pierce, you can get away with that only as long as he has a fake beard covering his twinkly Irish face. The embarrassment here is not so much the big stupid pixel of a movie we ended up with- it's the fact that the producers entertained the idea they could make a post-9/11 thriller starring a man who can't keep in tune with an ABBA song.